RHETORIC IN THE RED OCTOBER CAMPAIGN: EXPLORING THE WHITE
VICTIM IDENTITY OF POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
by
WILLEMIEN CALITZ
A THESIS
Presented to the School of Journalism and Communication
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Science
June 2014
THESIS APPROVAL PAGE
Student: Willemien Calitz
Title: Rhetoric in the Red October Campaign: Exploring the White Victim Identity of
Post-Apartheid South Africa
This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the Master of Science degree in the School of Journalism and Communication by:
Christopher Chavez
Pat Curtin
Yvonne Braun
Chairperson
Member
Member
and
Kimberly Andrews Espy
Vice President for Research and Innovation;
Dean of the Graduate School
Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School.
Degree awarded June 2014
ii
© 2014 Willemien Calitz
iii
THESIS ABSTRACT
Willemien Calitz
Master of Science
School of Journalism and Communication
June 2014
Title: Rhetoric in the Red October Campaign: Exploring the White Victim Identity in
Post-Apartheid South Africa
This study explores whiteness through a rhetorical analysis of the language used
in a speech made at a Red October campaign rally in South Africa in October, 2013. The
Red October campaign positions white South Africans as an oppressed minority group in
the country, and this study looks at linguistic choices and devices used to construct a
white victim identity in post-apartheid South Africa. This thesis considers gender,
religion, race, culture, class and ethnicity as intersections that contribute to the discursive
construction of whiteness in the new South Africa. Ultimately, the study gives us a better
understanding of whiteness, and particularly whiteness in South Africa, and the
importance of language and power in certain political, social and cultural contexts.
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CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME OF AUTHOR: Willemien Calitz
GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED:
University of Oregon, Eugene
Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa
DEGREES AWARDED:
Master of Science, Media Studies, 2014, University of Oregon
Bachelor of Philosophy, Journalism Honours, 2010, Stellenbosch University
Bachelor of Arts, Languages & Journalism, 2009, University of Pretoria
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:
Non-Profit Communication
Strategic Communication
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Green Times, Journalist & Editorial Assistant
South Africa
Communications Officer, Tholulwazi Uzivikele
South Africa
GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS:
Ally Award, 2014, Multicultural Center, University of Oregon
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I sincerely appreciate the support and guidance through the process of completing
this thesis provided to me by my chair and wonderful human being, Christopher Chavez.
I would like to thank my other two committee members Pat Curtin and Yvonne Braun for
their honest advice and support. In general I would like to thank Leslie Steeves for
getting me to Oregon and to the University of Oregon, and Peter and Sheila Laufer,
Donna Davis, and my cohort for academic and personal support throughout the
completion of my master’s program. Most of all I would like to thank my friends and
family, in South Africa and across the world, for their loyal and unconditional support. It
has been a wonderful achievement for me to complete my master’s degree, and I just
want to acknowledge what a privilege it is to have been part of the academic community.
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Aan ma Mariaan, pa Hans, Faan, Marisa, Louise, Gerno, Juan en Emi.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter
Page
I. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................
1
Background and Context........................................................................................
2
Theory and Literature Review ...............................................................................
5
Motivation for Research Topic ..............................................................................
15
Methodological Discussion …...............................................................................
16
Self-reflexivity in the Analysis .............................................................................
19
The Red October Rally Context.............................................................................
20
II. ANALYSIS .............................................................................................................
25
Afrikanerhood, Whiteness, and Code-Switching ..................................................
25
The Role of Class in the Creation of the White Victim ........................................
35
Age, Religion, and Code-Switching ……….… ....................................................
37
Gender Dynamics in the Movement .....................................................................
42
Discussion: The Creation of the White Victim .....................................................
51
III. CONCLUSION......................................................................................................
60
Limitations and Future Research ..........................................................................
67
REFERENCES CITED ...............................................................................................
70
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
On 10 October 2013, as part of the Red October campaign, approximately 800
white South Africans participated in a protest march at the country’s Union Buildings to
hand over a memorandum to the South African government. In the memorandum, the
movement focuses on whites being an “ethnic minority” and accuses the democratic
South African government of failing its white citizens. According to the group’s website,
“People all over the World released RED Balloons in the skies, in protest against the
inhumane Slaughter and Oppression of the White People of South Africa. This needs to
stop and can no longer be ignored” (Red October, 2014).
The protest has been influenced by three prominent figures of Afrikaner society –
two of them, Sunette Bridges and Steve Hofmeyr, are Afrikaans pop singers, while the
third, Dan Roodt is an academic. The Red October protest has created a platform for
white South Africans to claim minority status and, in the process, co-opt civil rights
language. It has a strong presence and support online, making it possible for expat
Afrikaners across the world to participate, and is continuing to lead physical protests and
rallies across South Africa and in other parts of the world. The Red October campaign
draws on the rhetoric of whiteness and Afrikanerhood in significant ways to try to appeal
to and mobilize its audience.
In this thesis I look at a speech performed by speakers Bridges and Hofmeyr at
the primary Red October rally to study the discursive construction of whiteness in postApartheid South Africa. Specifically, I am interested in looking at the use of rhetorical
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strategies and devices, which includes linguistic choices and recurring themes and images
that emerge in their speech. This speech forms a core part of the Red October campaign
because it was made at the first ever Red October rally, where it was filmed and
disseminated online for other white South Africans and expats to see. The speech is
significant because it contains the key messages of the Red October campaign and
reveals important information about whiteness in post-Apartheid South Africa.
My research questions for this study are as follows: How do Hofmeyr and Bridges
try to construct appeal with the audience through their speech? What rhetorical devices
are they using and how? What does the language in this speech reveal about the
discursive construction of whiteness in the “new South Africa”?
Background and Context
As South Africa’s fifth democratic election appears on the horizon, its struggle to
overcome decades of racial segregation is still fresh in the memory of the nation. In April
1994 millions throughout the country and around the world cheered as long lines of
voters queued to participate in the first step of legitimizing the country’s transformation
to a new, and what was anticipated to be a more equal, society.
On the eve of democracy, the release of the African National Congress leader
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela marked what Shapiro (Eades, 1999) called an “increased
desire on the part of Africans, coloreds, Indians, and many whites for a continued pattern
of change away from a system of almost complete white domination and racial
segregation know as apartheid that had violently disrupted their country internally and
increasingly isolated them externally” (Eades, 1999). Apartheid was an extreme form of
racial segregation to protect advantaged whiteness that originated with colonial conquest
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that in 1948, with the founding of the National Party, evolved into a system of ‘apart’ness that was woven into every aspect of South African life (Eades, 1999; Steyn, 2001).
When Afrikaners assumed political office, they perfected an existing system of
segregation that served the interests of Afrikaners, who continued its entrenchment
through legal and constitutional means.
The Apartheid narrative had at its core the belief that South Africa had
“originated” in 1652 with the arrival of Dutch settlers. Afrikaners particularly saw the
arrival of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape of Good Hope as the planting of a nation and the
bringing of civilization to the “dark continent” of Africa (Cloete, 1992). Additionally,
white mythology has it that “Europeans and Africans arrived roughly at the same time:
this leads some whites to claim that territorial segregation, one of the main planks of
latter-day apartheid, is justified” (Anzovin, 1987, p. 7).
With their arrival, colonialists created an immediate division of races by
implementing slavery. Ownership of the Cape region had been contested by British
colonialists as “South Africa became a treasured and controversial piece of the African
pie to promote commerce, Christianity and civilization” (Eades, 1999, p. 5). After The
Great Trek, a relocation of Dutch Boers to the north of the country, the tension between
the Boer and British colonies reached its climax at the turn of the 20th century with the
South African War. According to Eades, Britain’s continued acquisition of territory in
South Africa “aroused resentment and increased nationalism in the Boer republics” (p. 6).
The formal declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1910, as well as the
discovery of gold and diamonds, secured white dominance in the country. “Early
apartheid was shaped by a general political program of segregation that included pass
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laws (laws that restricted black population of white areas), differentiation in wage levels,
mission-based schools, and a white franchise” (Eades, 1999, p. 7). Such institutionalized
white privilege first appeared in law books in 1913 with the passing of the Natives Land
Act, which prohibited African purchase or lease of land outside certain areas known as
“reserves.” Eventually, under the rule of H.F. Verwoerd, the “pillars” of apartheid were
established in the form of race definition, control over African migration, white control of
politics, separation of labor, separate institutions and separate amenities. These pillars
“kept black South Africans almost out of sight from whites” (Eades, 1999, p. 15). Racial
classification formed a central part of the apartheid system. These historically developed
divisions became crucial from the 1950s and were fundamental in creating a social
hierarchy that underpinned white dominance in a mixed-race society. The four
classifications separated whites (or Europeans), coloureds (those who were a mixture of
different groups including whites), Asians (Indians), and Bantus (Africans). These
divisions are highly complex, particularly when the divisions within each group are
examined.
According to Eades, Afrikaners dominated the initial stages of the development of
apartheid. Right-wing forces gained control over South African politics and managed to
create a government that included only one ethnic group, representing about 12% of the
population. “The term “nation” was translated by Afrikaners into a group identity based
on race and Afrikaner culture” (Eades, 1999, p. 35). Consequently, as Afrikaners
increasingly dominated state power in the country, their sense of identity became more
racial than cultural. They came to identify themselves as a group with the first claim to
certain privileges.
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In the 1980s, with growing resistance to apartheid, Afrikaners’ self-perception
became more defensive. State power had become a way for Afrikaners not only to uphold
the apartheid system but ultimately to support their identity. On the eve of change
feelings of victimization surfaced among Afrikaners, and they demanded that their
history be legitimized and their contribution to the country be acknowledged. Unlike
Afrikaners, English whites at this point had no created tradition or straightforward
ideology, and their nationalism was not as strong.
In February 1990 President F. W. de Klerk announced the unbanning of political
groups such as the African National Congress (ANC), as well as the release of a list of
political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela. According to Eades, change was both
embraced and resisted by white groups: “That the de Klerk government accepted the
results of the election and transferred power peacefully boded well for the new South
Africa. That some disaffected whites, especially Afrikaners in the countryside, stepped up
militia training and warned of an impending Armageddon did not” (Eades, 1999, p. 31).
Significantly, Eades notes that eventually identification among different groups in South
Africa started changing in the late 1990s when language and ethnic group status become
more prominent forms of identity than political identification.
Theory and Literature Review
It is against this political background that I am interested in studying whiteness in
post-apartheid South Africa. Whiteness, according to Frankenberg, is the shape that white
people’s lives take as it has been shaped by race. In the same way men are “gendered,”
she refers to white people as “raced” (Frankenberg, 1988, p. 1). Frankenberg explains
three key aspects of whiteness: Whiteness is a location of structural advantage and racial
5
privilege; it’s a “standpoint,” a place from which “white people look at ourselves, at
others and at society” (p. 1); and whiteness refers to a set of cultural practices that are
usually unmarked and unnamed. She adds that whiteness refers to “a set of locations that
are historically, socially, politically, and culturally produced and, moreover, are
intrinsically linked to unfolding relations of domination” (Frankenberg, 1988, p. 6).
Frankenberg believes that studying whiteness means looking critically at the concept of
race itself. To her, the most useful definition of race is one where it is viewed as socially
constructed and tied to power relations and processes of struggle, and significantly,
whose meaning changes over time. Omi and Winant support the idea of race as being
socially constructed and not static. They refer specifically to how race had previously
been viewed as a biological category, one that placed people of color as biologically
inferior to white people. According to Omi and Winant, this construction was used to
justify economic and political inequities. Thus, the way race has generally been viewed,
with whiteness as unnamed and unmarked, has produced the “autonomous white/Western
self” in opposition to the “marked Other racial and cultural categories” (Frankenberg,
1988, p. 17) that co-constructs the dominant racial category. Hall (1996) echoes the idea
of race as socially constructed and changing with his critical view of the racial binary,
the “us” vs “them.” In a chapter on the construction of blackness, he says about binaries:
“They become, not only what they have, at times, certainly been – mutually excluding
categories, but also, what they sometimes are – differential points on a sliding scale”
(Hall, 1996, p. 215).
Whiteness in South Africa then should be viewed in its historical and political
context, of which apartheid formed a large part. According to Steyn (2001), the system of
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apartheid was a “logical, if extreme, interpretation of modern Western whiteness” (p.
xxxi). South Africa was the last country in Africa to achieve majority rule, and is home to
a comparatively larger group of white citizens than any other African country. The legal
system that enshrined the privilege of whites in South Africa has disappeared and they
face adjusting to a new situation in which “their traditional senses of identity, purpose,
and place in society have largely become obsolete and in need of substantial
modification” (Schutte, 1995, p. 1). The collapse of the regime of white dominance and
shifting of power has “fragmented” whiteness in South Africa. Steyn claims that
“different narratives of what it means to be white are vying for legitimation in the hearts
and minds of white South Africans.”(Steyn, 2001, p.xxxi). She believes South Africans
would have to reinterpret and reconfigure the available discourses to create meaningful
identities in a context where political circumstances have drastically changed.
The pre-1994 context allowed whites as the privileged group to take their identity
as the standard by which everyone else is measured. Steyn refers to the “master
narrative” that provided the dominant frame for sense making and that even defined the
terms for oppositional identities. The master narrative was historically constructed as
“absolutely centered, unitary, masculine” and legally enforced minority white supremacy
(Steyn, 2001, p. 151). Fundamental to this narrative of white identity is “othering” (p.
xxv) - the process of identifying the self with a series of signifiers that are believed to be
desirable, while identifying those one overpowers with the oppositional chain that one
rejects. JanMohamed (Steyn, 2001), calls this an “ideologically-driven psychological
projection” that attempts to create “a pure, homogeneous identity for the self, while
simultaneously creating a focus in the other for all the qualities one cannot tolerate in
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oneself, a kind of inverted self-image” (p. 14). The “other” is perceived as an evil the
dominant seeks to disassociate from and in the process becomes threatening. The
oppressor accumulates “surplus morality” in this way and simultaneously becomes the
master and the innocent – a basis on which hate and aggression towards the “other” is
justified.
“Fear” has thus formed the core of the white colonial project in South Africa.
“Whiteness in South Africa has always, at least in some part, been constellated around
discourses of resistance against a constant threat” (Steyn, 2001, p. 25). These fears have
been acted onto, and through, black bodies. The anxieties that were always present are
fears of being dominated and overrun, losing their purity as a race, and consequently for
Afrikaners, the fear of cultural genocide through intermingling. This anxiety pervades the
nation’s psyche with a feeling of the end just being put off – what Steyn (2001, p. 25)
refers to as the “rolling apocalypse.”.
The pervasive fears of South African whites have also become characteristic of
their process of coming to terms with their loss of a sense of importance and relevance.
This is reflected in the “widespread tendency to refer to their position as marginalized”
(Steyn, 2001, p. 159). Schutte effectively argues that this group is not marginalized,
however, stating, “though numerically a minority, South African whites are a majority in
terms of the political and economic power they wield” (Schutte, 1995, p. 4).
Schutte, in his study of white identities of post-apartheid South Africa in the form
of interviews, makes the point that whiteness in South Africa is challenging to study
because of the confusion of race, ethnicity, class, and culture, stating that “the context of
inequality and oppression in which they justify their separate existence exposes their
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argument that their ethnic consciousness is culturally and racially based” (1995, p. 25).
He argues that racism is thus concealed by the claim of cultural ethnic awareness. He
adds that South African whites have been self-defined as an ethnic group, but this is
merely their own creation, a social construction.
I therefore cannot study whiteness in South Africa without looking into the
culture (or ethnic group, as they identify) that has been synonymous with the white race
and has been labeled the creators of apartheid. I have to study the Red October movement
by also exploring its elements of Afrikanerhood.
Afrikanerhood in South Africa
Steyn views Afrikaners as a “sociologically indigenous” group with a deep
connection to the country. “Unlike their English neighbours, who were also emigrants
they seem seldom to have thought of “home” as somewhere behind them. Instead they
struggled for years to find a new home and a new unity as a people” (Steyn, 2001, p. 29).
According to Schutte, Afrikaners were more rural and often illiterate, and therefore not
treated as equals by the British settlers. A kind of internal colonization existed within the
white group as Afrikaners had to fight for first-class citizen status. “The texture of the
Afrikaners’ whiteness, then, was coarsened by discourses of indignation and rebellion
toward the more confident whiteness of overlordship assumed by the English” (Schutte,
1995, p. 26).
Afrikaners, under the white ruling government, eventually gained not only power
over the state but also over the knowledge circulating among whites. Textbooks were
controlled by the Afrikaner-led government and taught white people that black people
were inferior, the Afrikaner had a special relationship with the Christian God, South
9
Africa rightfully belonged to the Afrikaner, South Africa was an agricultural country and
Afrikaners its farmers, the Afrikaner military was strong and ingenious, the Afrikaner
was threatened, South Africa was the leader of Africa and that the Afrikaner has a Godgiven task in Africa (Cloete, 1992; Schutte, 1995;). At that point, to be an Afrikaner one
had to meet the criteria of being white and Afrikaans-speaking (Cloete, 1992).
Steyn argues, therefore, that post-apartheid South Africans grew up in a context
that did not problematize the superiority of whiteness, let alone the notion of “race.”
Additionally, whatever the individual experiences or responses of people in South Africa
was, it was the “apartheid version of the master narrative of whiteness that underwrote
their material and psychological existence” (2001, p. 58). The master narrative fell apart
in April 1994 with the democratic elections, and now there are many “shades of
whitenesses” legally available to white South Africans – all but the previously legally
endorsed master narrative.
The importance of studying whiteness
According to Steyn, the very fact that whiteness has become visible as a construct
of academic study shows that it is losing its ideological hold on intellectuals globally and
challenges the assertion that whiteness is still invisible in South Africa. Understanding
the interaction between power and privilege in the contemporary world has “brought
about the upsurge of academic interest in whiteness” (Steyn, 2001, p. xxv).
She believes that deconstructing whiteness “saps” (p. xxviii) its power by
revealing the social construction of the narratives of South African whites within a
particular political and historical context, and showing whose interests those narratives
have served. “The issue is to reconceptualize racial polarization as a white problem to be
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located and addressed in the discourses, socialization, political and economic privilege of
white people, the racial elite, rather than coming from “the existence of blacks”” (Steyn,
2001, p. xxviii).
However, she calls for more studies on the white diaspora that are removed from
the Euro-American center who share creolized cultural narratives. The disruption of
power in South Africa, where whites are continuing to seek their livelihood in a situation
where they have neither numerical nor political power, is unusual in the history of
whiteness. “By definition therefore the circumstances in the new South Africa
problematize the way whiteness was constructed as the social positionality of
domination” (Steyn, 2001, p. 164). At the time of her study, Steyn felt that literature on
whiteness written from a North American perspective represented attitudes of the old
apartheid South Africa and couldn’t make space for new white identities that have started
developing in the country. Schutte also emphasizes the complexity of whiteness in postapartheid South Africa, because “the rationales whites produce for the structure of their
society and the nature of their culture would differ from the rationalisations and selfjustifications of their counterparts in white America” (Schutte, 1995, p. 4). He therefore
calls for more knowledge about how white people in South Africa think and construct
their identities.
In many ways, what the Red October movement is currently doing was predicted
by Schutte when he wrote What Racists Believe in 1995, stating that “in my view, a
majority of whites, even liberals, whether Afrikaans or English speaking, will seek legal
or constitutional guarantees for the preservation of their group. If legal protection proves
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impossible, they will erect social and physical boundaries to achieve the same end”
(Schutte, 1995, p. 74). He sees this as a form of white privilege.
In a text on organized racism, Blee (2002) affirms the importance of studying
whiteness, particularly in the context of constructing identity. She believes that
understanding whiteness could be used to lure people out of racist groups and racist
activities. By analyzing and understanding these groups through accurate analysis, one is
more empowered to challenge racist activism and the mobilization of prejudiced groups.
This is echoed by Frankenberg’s view that “by examining and naming the terrain of
whiteness, it may, I think, be possible to generate or work toward antiracist forms of
whiteness, or at least antiracist strategies for reworking the terrain of whiteness” (1988, p.
7). Blee also calls attention to racist groups’ reliance on mass communication and the
Internet to disseminate their ideologies. Even though she is unsure of the ultimate effect
of the Internet on racist organizing, she thinks that it may aid coordination and make
racist ideas appear more legitimate.
According to Gerbaudo, modern media have always created a channel that social
movements could use to communicate, organize, and mobilize. Social media, in
particular, are resources for conveying abstract opinions and choreographing collective
action to create a sense of common identity (Gerbaudo, 2012). In the same way, Van de
Donk, Loader, Nixon, and Rucht (2004) refer to new media and social media as
“alternative communication spaces” that develop and widely circulate information with
fewer conventions or editorial filters than in the mainstream media. They warn, however,
that one should not necessarily be idealizing these developments without a critical eye.
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“For one thing, the activists one finds on the net are not all necessarily democratic in
character: there are also racists, neo-nazis, and other unsavoury types” (p. xiii).
The Internet has also played an important role in creating and maintaining
nationalism. “Nations thrive in cyberspace, and the internet has become a key technology
for keeping nations (and other abstract communities) together” (Eriksen, 2007, p. 1).
According to Eriksen, the Internet is currently used to strengthen national identities, and
this includes nations who have lost their territory, such as the Afrikaners in South Africa.
These Afrikaners have resisted the new democracy by championing the building of a
“white homeland,” engaging in terrorist attacks to destabilize the state, and others have
“created a virtual nation, or perhaps a nation-in-waiting, on the Internet” (2007, p. 11).
The rhetoric used on these sites and in these movements range from dangerous to
moderate and include the yearning for their own nation-state, the praising of the beauty of
the land, and the glorifying of past Afrikaner achievements. This rhetoric makes a
compassionate appeal to the international community by portraying Afrikaners as a
tormented group of martyrs and victims. “Afrikaners still largely live in South Africa,
though many feel that they have been deprived of their civil rights” (Eriksen, p. 11), and
Eriksen believes this Afrikaner belief that their rights have been stripped of them will be
used more as rallying points for political action.
Anderson, in his book Imagined Communities, talks about how the nation has
existed and still exists even without any scientific definition. He calls nations “modular”
and says they are capable of being transplanted “with varying degrees of selfconsciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a
correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological installations” (Anderson, p. 48).
13
Anderson defines nation as an imagined political community that is both inherently
limited and sovereign. These communities are imagined because people who are
members have never heard or met, or possibly never will, many of the other members, yet
an image of communion exists in each individual. Nation, regardless of inequalities that
may exist within each, “is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (p. 50).
Even though this study focuses on a speech made offline, it is important to keep in
mind that this speech was and still is disseminated online and much of the reaction to and
interactivity with the speech occurred online, on different platforms. Much of its reach
and impact can therefore be influenced by its online presence. This is significant
especially in the context of the campaign receiving little to no supportive media coverage
that made the Red October supporters more reliant on the Internet for receiving messages
and participating in the campaign. My analysis of this speech is also mediated, as I
looked at an online version of a video that was filmed as the speech was made.
A live speech, such as the one I am analyzing, is a source or a channel aimed at
getting certain messages across to the target audience. Language choice thus makes some
of the important messages stronger and possibly enhances or influences currently held
knowledges. This type of interaction, because it isn’t mediated at the time when the
speech is made, could have a more persuasive impact on its receivers by providing a
more memorable and powerful message to them (Moffitt, 1999). In this study I therefore
consider how the key messages of the campaign’s primary speech is constructed, and by
whom they are constructed.
RQs: How do Hofmeyr and Bridges try to construct appeal with the audience
through their speech? What rhetorical devices are they using and how? What does the
14
language in this speech reveal about the discursive construction of whiteness in the “new
South Africa”?
Motivation for Research Topic
Many of the aspects that the literature covers seem to be visible in the Red
October movement, if only on surface level. I chose this particular topic because
exploring these issues in-depth is not only valuable to challenging racial inequality in
post-apartheid South Africa but it also holds value for me personally. I believe that white
South Africans have been affected by the apartheid lenses in more ways than we realize,
and it is therefore crucial for us to deconstruct what we have been taught. I believe that
many of these ideas still linger in white society, whether overtly or whether more
covertly within some white identities. I think that researching the rhetoric of whiteness
and Afrikanerhood is important for challenging white supremacy, right-wing groups,
racists, and generally influential leaders but also to challenge other inequalities such as
experienced by certain gender, class, sexuality, and age positions, among others, within
our current social structures. Ideally, understanding the historical and current race
relations of South Africa can also guide our society to its goal of social and economic
integration. To make sense of identities and the structures within which they exist, the
core of my analysis focuses on language. Language plays a big role in the expression of
power in South Africa – even though this use seems to be dynamic and changing. To
some, the rhetorical strategies that are present in the Red October movement might seem
obvious, and I therefore think having grown up in an Afrikaner society and having been
indocrinated with similar rhetorical messages myself it is helpful to understand how these
strategies operate and in fact make a lot of sense in a protest such as Red October.
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Methodological Discussion
For this study I look at how whiteness is discursively constructed within the Red
October campaign. My method will therefore suitably be a rhetorical analysis.
Specifically, for this study I look at rhetoric in a speech that was delivered by
Steve Hofmeyr and Sunette Bridges at a Red October rally at the Union Buildings in
Pretoria. In criticism, according to Foss (2004), rhetoric is defined as “the human use of
symbols to communicate” (p. 4). Foss believes that human beings use symbols to frame
their experience, and therefore every symbolic choice we make results in seeing the
world in one way rather than another. On an informal, daily basis, we tend to respond to
symbols by saying “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” Analyzing rhetoric and investigating
symbols involves engaging in this natural process in a more conscious, systematic, and
focused way, to better understand our response to them. I chose this approach for my
study primarily because of my agreement with Foss that “knowledge of the operation of
rhetoric can help make us more sophisticated audience members for messages” (Foss,
2004, p. 8). She explains that if we better understand the variety of options available to
people who use rhetoric as they construct messages and how they function together to
create the effects they produce, we are able to question the choices made in the
construction of acts and artifacts. “We are less inclined to accept existing rhetorical
practices and to respond uncritically to the messages we encounter. As a result, we
become more engaged and active participants in shaping the nature of the worlds in
which we live” (Foss, 2004, p. 8).
In a study on the rhetoric used to indoctrinate youth in post-war Spain, Pinto
(2004) discusses the several different rhetorical strategies that can be used to influence or
16
persuade a group of people. The simulation of multiple voices, creating the illusion of
dialogue between different representatives and the use of emotionally charged language
through myth-making are some strategies that have been used to go as far as controlling
and manipulating audiences. In the same text, Menz talks about the process of
constructing ideological language through not only myth making but also
anthropomorphization (giving a “body” image to the nation of Spain) and sacrilization
(elevating their leaders to be godly figures). According to Menz, these rhetorical devices
“often appear in the form of methaphors, stereotypes, slogans, and symbols” (Pinto,
2004, p. 653). Kinneavy adds here that from the constant positioning and framing of
these key symbolic components rises an overarching myth in public discourse.
Significantly, Pinto comments that the discourse created by these rhetorical strategies is a
world free from the need to comment on reality, and therefore these words and images
become a substitute for reality.
I initially became aware of the Red October movement because I follow several
self-identified South African antiracist advocates on Twitter, and during the month of
October I saw a range of aggressive interactions on my Twitter feed that were centered
around the campaign. I soon read the movement’s website and followed some of its most
important opinion leaders to get a sense of the ideas they were representing. I joined the
“debate” around the Red October campaign and engaged with people that were either for
or against the movement. As I increasingly became personally attacked by supporters of
the movement, I noticed how members were drawing on the rhetoric of white privilege
and Afrikaner nationalism to make their arguments.
17
I realized that I wanted to know how the Red October lured its members – what
kind of rhetoric was hitting at the heart of an Afrikaner and a white South African to
make them join in an actual protest for “white minority rights”? To answer my question
about how Red October managed to appeal to the white and specifically Afrikaner
community, I wanted to look at a text that I could analyze that would make this clear.
Hofmeyr and Bridges’ speech is an ideal artifact to answer this question, and I found it
publicly available in a video format on their website. It had also been circulating widely
on Facebook and Twitter at the time.
As a white, Afrikaans-speaking South African woman who was born in 1988 and
therefore experienced a change in race dynamics in the country throughout my entire life,
I believe that I can bring a valuable perspective to the discourse of whiteness and
Afrikanerhood. I find that my position within the ethnic, racial, and cultural structures of
South Africa makes a qualitative analysis the ideal tool for me to study this topic. I want
to stress that in many ways studying this is also highly personal for me – trying to
understand where I come from, what could have shaped my own beliefs and those close
to me, and therefore gaining the knowledge to challenge white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy (hooks, 2013) in the academia but also on a realistically interpersonal level
when I return to South Africa. I hope that this study will make me a more critical
audience member within my own culture and give me the language and knowledge to
challenge the power and ideology of the people shaping that culture, especially as it
affects other South Africans.
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Self-reflexivity in the Analysis
As I was doing my data collection for this thesis my views on addressing racism
underwent different levels of transformation, and this is important to share because I
believe it influences my analysis. Working with antiracism efforts in Eugene and on the
University of Oregon campus has exposed me to different approaches to meeting people
where they are at regarding understanding issues of race. In many cases I had seen people
become exhausted trying to explain, elaborate, and educate others on structural and
systematic oppression. In other cases I felt that people had been dismissed as bad people
because they don’t “get it” or weren’t using the right language to talk about these
concepts. In certain contexts I felt like there was very little space to ask questions and
even less space to admit to grappling with and struggling to understand issues of racial
oppression.
I realized that many narratives around racial justice in the groups I worked with
completely denounces the concept of meeting people where they’re at. In some of the
communities I participated I felt like people were unable to see other people, particularly
white male individuals, as human beings because of the privileged identities they seem to
embody. Something about that made me feel uncomfortable and made me rethink my
position and approach as an aspiring ally to resisting racial oppression. From that
position, I realized I felt that there was a lack of compassion in the antiracism approach I,
and many like me, had been taking.
I don’t view compassion as a way to accept racism in our society or to apologize
for racist behaviour, but I do feel that compassion is a key part in seeing people as human
beings and that their complexities form part of the identities they embody. I believe that
19
for some, compassion might be useful in addressing racism and working with people to
dismantle the prejudices and other ideas that they have been either indoctrinated with in
certain communities or that the white supremacist systems and structures have socialized
them to believe.
This realization helps me explore and analyze the speech made by the two
Afrikaner leaders of the Red October movement in a different way. Listening to them
speak I realized I can condemn the prejudiced ideas they distribute, but I can also have
compassion for where they’re coming from. Allowing myself to look at and try to
understand the complexities of both the Afrikaner and white identities in South Africa
helps me gain much more insight into understanding why certain rhetorical strategies
were used to persuade and mobilize the members of the Red October movement. I
believe that in many ways my self-reflexivity in this study in fact lessens the bias I bring
to it. My research aims to be intersectional, and therefore considers how class, gender,
race, culture, religion and nation affect each other in this context, and considers that these
intersections do not operate independently from each other. Being able to both recognize
the oppressive structures that play into this speech, and also see the complexities of the
people participating in the Red October movement, requires me to try to maintain some
level of objectivity.
The Red October Rally Context
Throughout modern South African history there has existed an array of groups
aimed at looking after its white citizens. The most renowned of these, although they
advocate more specifically for Afrikaners, are the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging
(AWB), The Afrikaner Volksfront (AVF), the Boeremag, and the political party
20
Vryheidsfront Plus. The AWB - Afrikaner Resistance Movement - was established in
South Africa in the 1980s when resistance to Apartheid was on the rise and is currently
perhaps best known for the fact that its former leader, white-supremacist Eugene
Terreblanche, was hacked to death on his farm in 2010. The Boeremag - Farmer Force is an extremist right-wing militia group whose ringleader Mike du Toit was convicted for
treason in 2013 for attempting to assassinate Nelson Mandela in the early 1990s.
Most of these groups have been and still are overtly racist and adhere to the
ideology of white supremacy. Beaugrande regards ideology as a “system that sets
priorities among “ideas” (concepts, meanings, actions), and legitimizes certain ones as
“true,” “proper,” “natural,” “correct,” “valuable,” “respectable,” and the like”
(Beaugrande, 1997, p. 517). Because the ideologies of these groups are based on and
have been supported by the ideological structures that were in power when they were
founded, they have no place in the new, multiracial South Africa.
It is against this backdrop that the Red October movement has recently emerged.
Red October takes a different approach to image-making strategies in regards to looking
out for South Africa’s white citizens, as it advocates for “the oppression of Ethnic
Minorities in South Africa” (Red October, 2014) - these minorities being white people.
The Red October march also prides itself in being a peaceful movement. Where the Red
October movement differs from other campaigns that have used the media or public
institutions as channels to promote their ideas, the Red October marches have received
little media coverage and almost no positive coverage in the mainstream South African
media. The movement’s only sounding board to distribute its ideology has been through
social media platforms such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and its website. The name Red
21
October stems from the fact that its first public rally was held in the month of October.
The color red, and the use of red balloons, refers to bloodshed and emphasizes its rallying
point that blood is shed by whites, while black people are seen as being responsible for
that violence. More specifically the red in Red October has strong connotations with farm
murders, which, as is discussed in this study, forms a key part of the creation of the white
victim in the new South Africa.
The first Red October protest march took place in Pretoria on October 10, 2013.
Approximately 800 white people marched on the grounds of the Union Buildings, where
the president of South Africa is housed, to hand over a memorandum to the South African
government. On the same day marches occurred in a couple of other towns and cities in
South Africa, and white South African expats in places such as Australia and the United
States of America participated in the protest as well. It is at the Union Buildings in
Pretoria that the speech I analyze in this chapter was given. Various people, including
pastors and artists, addressed the crowd, but I will look specifically at the rhetoric used in
the speech of the two people that have spearheaded the Red October movement, Sunette
Bridges and Steve Hofmeyr.
Sunette Bridges describes herself on her website as a “43-year old Mother of 5,
Afrikaner, Artist, Writer and often described as a Human Rights Activist. I see myself
rather as a concerned citizen of the once prosperous country called South Africa”
(Bridges, 2014). Bridges is essentially an Afrikaans pop singer whose fame can be
attributed to the popularity of her father, the former much-loved Afrikaner performer,
Bles Bridges. Steve Hofmeyr has popular culture star status in South Africa as well, at
least among Afrikaners. In this community Hofmeyr is viewed as an actor, singer,
22
songwriter, presenter, poet, writer, activist, and blogger. Hofmeyr wrote and performed
the anthem of the Blue Bulls rugby team called Die Bloubul, and this has made him
widely popular among rugby supporters, especially Afrikaners in the northern regions of
South Africa. Both Bridges and Hofmeyr are therefore influential South African
celebrities who have confident and charismatic characteristics. When trying to understand
the ways in which Hofmeyr and Bridges try to influence the audience, it is important to
know this background to have an idea of how they are viewed and perhaps trusted by the
audience because of their celebrity status.
In the next section I analyze the rhetorical devices and strategies that Steve
Hofmeyr and Sunette Bridges use to try to construct appeal with their audience at the Red
October rally. Rhetoric, from a Western perspective, aims to persuade an audience with
three tools: logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos is established when the speaker draws on
logical reasoning, pathos is established when the speaker appeals to the emotions and
personal lives of the audience, and ethos is established by the audience perception of the
speaker’s character and their possible shared values (Trenholm, 2008). According to
Trenholm, most researchers agree that “the success or failure of a speech depends on how
the speaker is perceived by the audience” (Trenholm, 2008, p. 260).
Rice and Atkin also emphasize the importance of speakers in the success of a
speech, saying that campaigns create or use opinion leaders who “exert interpersonal
influence on focal individuals” (2013, p. 6). They add that campaigns generally aim at
these opinion leader audiences because they seem to be more susceptible to campaign
messages. Additionally, the advantage of opinion leaders from a certain culture or
23
background in a campaign allows them to “customize the messages to the unique needs
and values of individuals in a more precise and context-relevant manner” (Rice & Atkin,
2013, p. 6) My study therefore not only includes exploring what imagery and language
Bridges and Hofmeyr draw upon in their speeches but also how that relates to who they
are as speakers.
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CHAPTER II
ANALYSIS
As explained in the analyses below, the audience that Bridges and Hofmeyr tries
to appeal to appears to be a white, Afrikaner, Christian, working class, and maledominated society.
Afrikanerhood, Whiteness and Code-Switching
One of the most important techniques that both Bridges and Hofmeyr use in their
speeches to establish ethos and pathos with the audience at the Red October rally is codeswitching. Code-switching is a language phenomena and considered an “in-group”
occurrence that is generally seen as “a device used to affirm participants’ claims to
membership and the solidarity of the group in contrast to outsiders” (Woolard, 1988, p.
69). Particularly, in this setting the speakers switch between using two different
languages: English and Afrikaans. Afrikaans has its origins in Dutch but has also been
influenced by German, Indian and Indonesian languages and Khoikhoi dialects, among
others (South African History Online, 2014). Afrikaans has a unique place in the power
dynamics that have played out in South Africa. The language originated as a “bastard
language” spoken by lower class white people; “respectable” whites spoke Dutch at the
time (Cloete, 1992). It is a language used predominantly by Afrikaners and is therefore
symbolic of Afrikaner culture. The choice between using English and Afrikaans at the
Red October march has important implications because of the different power
relationships these two languages have had in South Africa. During the British
occupation of South Africa, English was the dominant and dominating language of the
25
country and symbolized British rule. Under this rule most Afrikaners were forced to learn
English and in many spaces were forbidden to speak Afrikaans. For Afrikaners, the
English language had therefore become a symbol of the oppression of Afrikaner culture.
During apartheid, Afrikaans had shifted from being an oppressed language to
being the language of the oppressor. Afrikaans had become the institutional language of
the country and was meant to replace any African languages by being a compulsory
language in all schools. Because ultimately English has become the lingua franca of the
“new” South Africa, a way to navigate among the 11 official languages and many others,
English has in many ways become the language of reconciliation for many South
Africans. The current use of both these languages, however, does not occur in a historical
vacuum as I explained above. According to Williams, “a definition of language is always,
implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world” (Woolard &
Schieffelin, 1994, p. 55). In this text Woolard and Schieffelin discuss the link between
identity and language ideology. Thus, they look at how language is used by groups to
identify and signify power – looking at the “roles of language in the social experiences of
members as they contribute to the expression of the group” and understanding “social and
linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral or political interests”
(Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994, p. 57). Equating language and nation in the way explained
above, is in itself a historical and ideological construct and is interlinked with linguistic
choices as an expression of power.
The term ideology reminds analysts that cultural frames have social histories and
it signals a commitment to address the relevance of power relations to the nature
26
of cultural forms and ask how essential meanings about language are socially
produced as effective and powerful. (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994, p. 58)
Hofmeyr starts his speech in Afrikaans, and the bulk of the speech is conducted in
this language, his native language. A few minutes in, he switches to English, but also
openly resists it. “Yes I’m going to have to say some of this stuff in English, but
sometimes I wonder why?” The majority of the crowd cheers loudly and reacts positively
to this comment. With this resistance, Hofmeyr chooses to establish ethos with Afrikaans
speakers and thus reveals what he considers to be the in-group of the Red October
movement. Does “whiteness” then require the ability to speak the Afrikaans language or
ultimately to be an Afrikaner? This sentence and the overwhelming use of Afrikaans at
the rally potentially poke a hole in Red October’s entire argument of advocating for a
“minority group” because racially, whites are numerically fewer than black people. But
culturally or ethnically, Afrikaners are not numerically fewer than most African cultures
or ethnicity groups such as Venda and Shangaan groups. If Hofmeyr is thus excluding
English speaking whites through language, and is actively only speaking to Afrikaners
because he chooses Afrikaans, it could mean that these messages are meant to be
received by an in-group determined by culture or ethnicity and less determined by race. It
is interesting to see Hofmeyr, being an Afrikaner who has just established ethos with
Afrikaners in the audience, trying to navigate the historical tensions between the
Afrikaners and the British. Whites in South Africa are not a homogeneous group, and
tensions between the two predominant white groups still exist. From my observations,
Hofmeyr ends up speaking mostly Afrikaans and draws on Afrikaner cultural references,
thus making Afrikaners the central point of this speech.
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If my assumption that this speech is more directed at Afrikaners than at whites as
a whole is true, then the entire use of language in this situation is meant to create a
stronger relationship between the speaker and audience – the speaker communicating
predominantly from his position as Afrikaner and the audience receiving the message as
mostly Afrikaners.
Hofmeyr resists the use of English, while still attempting to make Englishspeaking whites feel part of the protest and while still making references to an
overarching white group to legitimize the Red October movement. His attempts are
inconsistent, however, and throughout the speech he conflates Afrikanerhood with
whiteness. For example, Hofmeyr tells the crowd: “You know you are the only minority
group in Africa marching for the luxury of mother-tongue education?” Using the word
luxury is a technique to make this “fact” seem absurd, because in Hofmeyr’s view this is
a given for all groups, but for Afrikaners it’s unfairly considered a “luxury.” Hofmeyr
also places a strong and loud emphasis on the words “Africa” and “mother-tongue
education.” Through this sentence it becomes clear that he’s not including Englishspeaking whites because the mother-tongue that he refers to is Afrikaans and not English.
“Everybody else wants to speak English,” followed by a switch to Afrikaans
through a low whisper maar nie ons nie, “but not us.” Here Hofmeyr uses “us” again, but
at this point I feel it is fair to say that “us” only includes Afrikaans speakers because it
has been established that the referred to in-group doesn’t want to speak English. He is
therefore trying to create rapport with what he perceives to be his target audience –
Afrikaners. He uses language strategically in this sentence: he starts out in English, but
28
then, to highlight the fact Afrikaners don’t want to speak English, he completes the
second part in Afrikaans.
Hofmeyr fails to mention that the march demands spaces for “exclusive”
Afrikaans education and creates the idea that Afrikaans as a language is being oppressed
or even prohibited at South African institutions. In reality, these institutions are simply
integrating Afrikaans with several other languages, or making English the primary
language in certain classrooms. None of the African languages in South Africa has the
same privileges that Afrikaans has – few to none classrooms teach entire courses in other
African languages, but there are many in Afrikaans. By insinuating that its language is
threatened, Hofmeyr is trying to persuade the audience that Afrikaners are victims in the
new South Africa.
Hofmeyr then digs into the issue of the education system and overtly expresses
his longing for the previous Afrikaans school systems, which he strongly emphasizes as
“brilliant.” He claims that if you were educated in that system, you would have been
bilingual and would have learned English anyway. Here, his argument is contradicting
because he is openly resistant to using English and to the use of English in the education
system, but then he praises the Afrikaans school systems for having taught English. This
could potentially be because he is trying to construct an argument based on logos – the
idea that Afrikaans should rationally be protected and in order to do that it should receive
higher status than other languages and be separated from English. In the current
education system, students still learn at least two languages, except Afrikaans isn’t
compulsory anymore but English is. The battle between the dominance of these two
29
languages symbolizes the historic and current tensions between the two represented
groups that unite under the umbrella of a white minority.
When Hofmeyr tries to explain that the Red October campaign is inclusive, he
says hierdie protes is uit die staanspoor uit vanaf Afrikaners, en wittes, “this protest
originates from Afrikaners, and whites.” As a way to emphasize the word “Afrikaners,”
Hofmeyr includes “and whites” softer and with less emphasis, as an afterthought. Here
Afrikaners and whites are acknowledged as two separate entities. Hofmeyr separates the
two to indicate that they are not a homogenous white group, and this acknowledgement
can in many ways be read as a rejection of English-speaking whites, which in turn again
establishes ethos with the Afrikaners in the audience. The confusion and contradictions
about whether this protest is created by whites and for whites as a homogenous group, or
whether it is in fact created for the advocacy of Afrikaner needs, recurs throughout the
speech.
A few paragraphs later Hofmeyr switches from Afrikaans to English when saying:
“you must know what the answer is when you say you’re going to march as an Afrikaner
or an Afrikaans person or a white person.” Here, Hofmeyr seems pretty aware of the
conflation of ethnicity, culture, and race in this protest and “you” is thus meant to include
both English-speaking whites and Afrikaners. Hofmeyr communicates differently in
Afrikaans and in English. He makes mistakes such as using the word “answer” instead of
something more fitting like “response.” That brings up the issue whether the words he
uses in English are as strategically chosen as they are in Afrikaans, and that could impact
the type of message that English speakers are receiving compared to Afrikaans speakers.
Having established himself as an Afrikaner and having actively set himself apart from
30
English-speaking groups, his use of the English language comes across as less sincere
and almost fabricated. To me, Hofmeyr seems more theatrical and that he is “performing”
the English language. I consequently feel like he is not establishing ethos with English
speaking whites, and I am not sure if it is even possible for him to do so. I assume the
majority of the crowd here is Afrikaans speaking, given how the audience reacts to
comments on resisting English, and it therefore makes sense why Hofmeyr keeps
switching to Afrikaans even though he tries to be inclusive. But it also narrows the
spectrum of what whiteness means, if this protest is based on advocating for whites.
This also brings up the idea that Afrikaners are willing to put aside the differences
they have with English speaking whites and unite under the umbrella of the white race
because they are desperate to set themselves apart from black people on the grounds of
race, the way they were able to during Apartheid. In many ways, under this whiteness
umbrella the myth of unity is created. Pinto (2004) writes about such a myth of unity that
existed among Spaniards and Hispanics in post-war Spain to successfully establish the
belief of superiority and racial pride in these groups. According to Pinto, stressing unity
“prevents the expression of discrepancies” (Pinto, 2004, p. 633) on cultural, political and
religious levels. This speech is for the most part performed in a way to avoid the
differences between Afrikaners and English-speaking whites, possibly to protect that
image of unity.
Finally, when Hofmeyr says Ek kyk na my eie mense en staan op as ‘n volk, “I
look after my own people and rise as a nation,” he says it in Afrikaans. By choice of
language then the message is clear that his volk is the Afrikaner. The word volk is in itself
symbolic to Afrikaners, and brings up the nostalgic ideas of unity and overcoming
31
hardships in the Anglo Boer war era. Again these images recall a period when English
whites and Afrikaner whites were pitted against each other, and the word volk, especially
pronounced in Afrikaans, has value only to the Afrikaner side of the battle.
Hofmeyr’s linguistic choices tell us more about how identity is constructed
through the use of nationalism in the midst of the confusion of ethnicity, culture, and
race. The volk, or nation, is symbolically constructed around Afrikaner nationalism.
Anderson’s (1983) definition of nation as an “imagined political community” (p. 48),
applies to this context as the Afrikaner nation is imagined as inherently limited and
sovereign. Particularly, the nationalism constructed through the speakers’ choice of
words is not a mere awakening of a nation to self-consciousness, but contributes to the
invention of a nation that does not exist. A characteristic of nation, and a reason why
nationalism is such a powerful tool for mobilization, is that “even the smallest nation will
never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the
minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson, 1983, p. 49). According
to Anderson, for the most part nations “dream of being free, and if under God, directly
so” (1983, p. 50).
The fight for freedom and sovereignty emerges strongly in many of the images
that Hofmeyr uses, particularly in reference to the Anglo-Boer War. He emphasizes the
national identity of the Afrikaners in the audience by using Afrikaner nostalgic images,
and particularly ones that create boundaries between this nation and another one (for
example the British). Hofmeyr says for example, In elke oorlog waarin jou voorvaders
betrokke was was hulle as ‘n reel die minderheid. Die minderheid! Dan wen hulle. Dis
waarvan af jy kom, het jy vergeet? “In every war your ancestors were involved in, they
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were as a rule the minority. The minority! Then they win. That’s where you come from,
have you forgotten?” Jou “your” and jy “you” here address Afrikaners. It has been a
central part of the pride of Afrikaner nationalism that they have historically been the
minority in certain battles and that some of those battles were won as a minority. One of
those battles was fought against the British in the Anglo-Boer war. It has formed a key
part of Afrikanerhood that the British were defeated by the Afrikaners, who view
themselves as a particularly powerful and strong nation, but this “win” has been widely
contested in South African history. Hofmeyr tries to encourage the audience by instilling
pride in their heritage, “have you forgotten?” a heritage that has now been represented as
an extremely courageous nation.
To make the Afrikaner audience believe that it can follow in the footsteps of its
ancestors by triumphing as a minority, Hofmeyr and Bridges convince members of their
minority status by playing into their belief that their culture is threatened. The anxiety of
cultural genocide has always been present in the minds of Afrikaners (Steyn, 2001). The
Red October movement thus becomes personal, the movement becomes about protecting
a threatened culture and not just about the rights that whites have in the new South
Africa. Hofmeyr and Bridges establishes both pathos and ethos with the audience by
using a variety of imagery that evoke the feeling of a threatened Afrikaner culture, which
again suggests “whiteness” as constructed by this movement inherently implies
Afrikanerhood.
For example Hofmeyr says straightforwardly: Ons is in ‘n hoek, ons is klein, ons
is min, ons het nie mag nie, ons is ‘n minderheidsgroep. “We are in a corner, we are
small, we are few, we don’t have power, we are a minority group.” Hofmeyr says this in
33
a rushed pace, creating the illusion of a running list of oppressions that whites or
Afrikaners (because he is speaking in Afrikaans) experiences in the post-Apartheid South
Africa. The concepts of being “small,” “few,” powerless, and a “minority group” are
associated with what oppressed groups experience globally and Hofmeyr is confidently
confirming the members’ beliefs that they are victims and that their culture is therefore
threatened. Hofmeyr expresses these ideas with energy and confidence - possibly a
technique to mobilize the group for direct action.
Farm murders symbolic of threatened culture
Farm murders have become a symbol of threatened Afrikaner culture in general
white public discourse, and this has been legitimized through the Red October movement,
particularly in the way Hofmeyr establishes pathos with the audience. Mid-speech
Hofmeyr lists in Afrikaans all the elements of treasured Afrikaner culture that this group
“loses” every time a boer (farmer) is killed.
Elke keer as daar ‘n boer vermoor word… “Every time a boer is murdered…”
This list is made up of specific references to food, poets, poems, religion, singers, songs,
books, Afrikaans metaphors, the former national anthem, Voortrekkers, city and street
names, sports teams, sports players, Afrikaans, Afrikaner education. The lists starts with
more contemporary Afrikaner rituals and beliefs, such as drinking brandy and Coke, and
then Hofmeyr works his way down history lane to more nostalgic images that have
shaped what Afrikanerhood means today. The list evokes emotion from Afrikaners, and
their fear is maintained by the reminder of what they are losing in the new South Africa.
This fear is exacerbated by the specifics that Hofmeyr uses, and he does so purposefully
to evoke emotions of sentimentality and nostalgia in the audience so that they can feel
34
that there is a lot at stake. Much of the purpose of this list boils down to what Hofmeyr
says in the following: Verloor jy ‘n klein stukkie taal, ‘n klein stukkie identiteit, ‘n klein
stukkie kultuur, ‘n klein stukkie jy. “You lose a small piece of language, a small piece of
identity, a small piece of culture, a small piece of you.” These are the most important
threats to a group’s existence - losing either its language, its identity, its culture or, as
Hofmeyr brings it back to the personal, losing a piece of each individual of the group
who has inevitably been shaped by the other three elements. These elements are
interlinked, and a threat to any of them can be used to mobilize the group to protect them.
It has been evident throughout this speech that all four of these elements are embedded in
Afrikanerhood, thus part of “whiteness” is being Afrikaner or subscribing to Afrikaner
values, or speaking Afrikaans.
The Role of Class in the Creation of the White Victim
The images of a threatened culture that were used above contribute to the creation
of the white victim. However another aspect of victimhood less related to culture or
ethnicity but moreso to class emerges as an important element of the Red October
campaign. As Bridges and Hofmeyr play with the image of victimhood, it brings up the
question of what kind of audience would be most susceptible to feeling threatened and
victimized in the new South Africa? I argue that working class people would find some
of Bridges and Hofmeyr’s key messages more appealing. This is because working class
white people possibly have more at stake when there is competition for jobs. Working
class whites’ livelihoods are therefore more directly affected by the current Black
Economic Empowerment and other Affirmative Action policies. Bridges says “We are
unhappy about the fact that there are laws in this country that determine that you can’t get
35
a job if you’re white.” I find it interesting that Bridges uses “we” in this sentence. She is
trying to include herself with the group that is affected by these “laws.” Hofmeyr echoes
that in his poem: “The one you chose to keep from the workplace by virtue of skin
colour.” Because this poem is called I am the Afrikaner, and it is written by Hofmeyr, he
includes himself in the group that is being kept from the “workplace.”
In reality Bridges and Hofmeyr are both middle- to upper-class white South
Africans who earn their money through a completely white industry - the Afrikaans
entertainment industry and market - and they are both therefore unaffected by the
competition of the integrated job sphere. Bridges, however, attempts to establish ethos in
another way around this issue, by finding a relevant common value between her and the
audience: their children. “Fifty-six percent of our children leave this country every single
year because they cannot find jobs.” Bridges uses “our” to include herself in this
experience and in many ways to insert herself in the class struggle. She emphasizes
“every” and “single” to exaggerate the perceived gravity of the situation. Here Bridges
also establishes logos because she is using facts to strengthen her argument. However,
these facts stem from personal research done by Hofmeyr, Bridges, and the academic
Dan Roodt, and are therefore not credible. Bridges’ argument is also narrow, as it ignores
the privileges of being mobile enough to find employment options internationally. In
many ways then, the Red October movement tries to legitimize whites’ minority status by
illustrating how one’s race status (white in this case) is synonymous with one’s class
status. This would then make the group seem similar to other minorities, such as many
African Americans, Native Americans, or Hispanic Americans in the United States of
America whose working class identities can be directly tied to their racial identities.
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Age, Religion and Code-Switching
Code-switching in Bridges’ speech also reveals different components in the
discursive construction of whiteness in South Africa. Bridges conducts most of her
speech in English but closes it off by singing an Afrikaans song. Two intersections are
important to note in the language used in Bridges’ song. Because the Afrikaans in this
song comes across as formal and official, it is possible that she is trying to construct
appeal with the audience on the basis of age and religion.
The song’s rhythm and tone is very much in line with the current Afrikaner
popular music that older Afrikaners listen to. Bridges’ status as a celebrity, the popularity
of her father, and her music genre is consumed and appreciated more by an older
Afrikaner generation, and it is therefore possible to assume that the Red October rally is
not necessarily aimed at including young people. This is because the generations that
were raised in the height of Apartheid or older lived insulated lives as Afrikaners. They
listened to the same kind of music, engaged with the same kind of media, and also used a
particular, formal form of Afrikaans.
Specific words such as nyd, “jealousy”; verbond, “vow”; smag, “yearn”; verduur,
“endure”; and vergader, “gather” are rarely used in everyday Afrikaans speech by young
people. These words could potentially have been chosen to fit the rhyming or rhythm
scheme of the song, but they also set the more conservative and formal tone of her song.
If Bridges aims at an older demographic, the age groups that were raised during
apartheid when the Boer War was glorified, one can better understand why these
Afrikaner nostalgia concepts are drawn upon to establish pathos, ethos, and logos with
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this particular audience. Throughout the song Bridges uses language to evoke images of
Voortrekkers and their struggles in the Great Trek.
Ons het met min die reis begin, “We started the journey with little,” is one such
image. Bridges aims to create a sense of nostalgia for the origins of Afrikaner culture,
providing a connection with its early colonial background. “We” here refers to the Dutch
settlers that arrived at the Cape of Good Hope with Jan van Riebeeck. The older
generation of Afrikaners believe that its Dutch ancestors arrived in “uncivilized” South
Africa in a setting of obstacles that they had to overcome with “little” compared to other
groups such as the British or the Europeans on other continents. The Afrikaner
generations with this perspective take a lot of pride in the hardships their ancestors had
overcome and also have a lot of gratitude for their ancestors. The sentence also invokes a
sense of humility, a technique Afrikaners have used to frame their role in colonialism to
distract from the violence and conquering they have engaged in on this “journey.”
Younger Afrikaners experience much less of this pride, gratitude, and nostalgia toward
their colonial heritage because they have a stronger connection to South Africa and being
South African in the “rainbow nation” sense than being an Afrikaner with European
ancestry. The colonial perspective of “uncivilized” Africa is still taught to Afrikaner
children, but as the dominance of the Afrikaner culture has dwindled, so has its
domination of South African history. Younger Afrikaners, the post-apartheid generation,
have therefore grown up in a less indoctrinated society, and a lot of them do not find such
a strong appeal in Voortrekker imagery. The way whiteness is constructed through the
Red October movement, therefore, is to include a group that will find appeal with
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Vootrekker and similar Afrikaner histories, and whiteness here thus requires a certain age
group as the in-group.
Many of the Voortrekker imagery that appeal to older white citizens also include
scenes of conflict and battle, such as the line in Bridges’s song, Kon elke stryd in geloof
oorwin, “Could win every battle through faith.” This narrative of winning battles is
characteristic of a nostalgic view on Afrikaner culture, and Bridges uses this as another
way of establishing pathos with the audience. The concept of battle creates the idea that
Afrikaners are a strong and powerful group, and thus Bridges uses that to mobilize the
Red October members. The idea of Afrikaners as a strong and powerful nation recurs
throughout Bridges and Hofmeyr’s speeches. Whites were indoctrinated during Apartheid
with the idea that the Apartheid government had one of the strongest and most powerful
armies in the world. This idea made white South Africans believe they could defeat
anyone that threatened their reign and power and consequently convinced average white
citizens not to give into change.
“Faith” resonates with the Afrikaner belief of their special relationship with the
Christian God who has helped and will help them win their battles. Bridges emphasizes
the importance of religion in the survival of the Afrikaner culture by begging God to
Hernu U verbond, “Renew Your vow.” The “vow” is sure to make the audience, again
assumed as being older and therefore more susceptible to these images, feel nostalgic.
Afrikaners believe that they have a special bond with God, and that idea stems from the
“promise” God made to them in the battle of Blood River against Dingaan and his Zulu
warriors after they vowed to commemorate the day to Him. According to Afrikaners’
version of history, God had “chosen” Afrikaners for victory, and ever since the day has
39
been celebrated as Geloftedag, or Day of the Vow/Covenant. After 1994 it has become
Reconciliation Day. As mentioned above, the word verbond is an Afrikaans word not
used often by the new generation of Afrikaners and the word itself is used only in
connection with religion, Afrikaner history, or formal and official institutions.
Age is thus an important component of whiteness as it is established through the
Red October movement, but the formal language in Bridges’ song is also possibly
constructing appeal on the basis of religion. As seen above, these two concepts are
interlinked. It is possible that younger white South Africans aren’t raised in such strict
and isolated religious contexts anymore, and the Red October movement could therefore
be unsuccessful in constructing appeal with them through the images of Afrikaner
nostalgia and the accompanying Afrikaner-Christianity portrayals.
Yet throughout history religious imagery has been successful in constructing an
appealing religious nation state, such as the Catholic Spain that Pinto (2004) describes in
his discourse analysis of post-War Spain. By using Christian symbolism and images of
the Christian nation’s godliness, power and civilization, the myth of the AfrikanerChristian nation that has a special relationship with God is strengthened. This myth
awards Afrikaners with higher morality, because it both justifies their participation in the
protest as the “chosen” nation and creates the idea that the Red October protest is part of
a moral crusade. These images are similar to those used by early South African
colonialists who used religious rhetoric to disguise their racism. Bridges’ use of
Protestant Christian imagery is also used to establish ethos with the audience because
most Afrikaners and especially older Afrikaners are devout Christians. By addressing
God in this song, and doing so in the opening line, she is showing that honoring God is
40
first priority to her, and therefore this grants her permission to be trusted by the audience:
Ek skryf ‘n brief aan U O Heer, “I write a letter to you oh Lord.” The word “Heer” is a
way of addressing God that’s specific to Afrikaans. It’s a respectful yet loving word for
God, but has also been used to refer to “gentleman” in Afrikaner culture. The word “U” is
also a very respectful word for “you” that’s only used in formal Afrikaans or if
addressing the Christian God. This line therefore establishes ethos because Bridges
singles herself out as “I” and knows how to address God in a way that illustrates her
shared feelings with the crowd about respect for Him. That respect for God is required in
the Afrikaner community, and thus forms a part of whiteness as created through this
movement. Reaching out to God with this opening line makes it seem as if the situation is
urgent, as if whites are turning to God because they are desperate for His help.
Bridges also confirms her relationship with the Christian God by revealing her
belief that he is the only God. Want ons weet almal leef in Hom, “Because we know
everyone lives in Him.” It is a crucial part of the practice of Christianity in the Afrikaner
culture to believe that He is the only true God. Bridges affirms not only that but also the
Afrikaner belief that the Christian religion is superior to all other religions. This sentence
sounds like a bottomline - “because” indicates that ultimately everything will follow
God’s plan because no-one can exist without God and God is therefore the highest form
of power. What interests me then is who almal “everyone” is. I believe that Bridges could
be referring specifically to the Afrikaner or white South African community and that her
“everyone” is not inclusive of all races and cultures. During Apartheid churches were
segregated because black people were considered immoral and not capable of equality
under God. This prejudice still lingers among Afrikaners especially, as many of them
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don’t see all races as having equal moral status. Regardless of who “everyone” includes
on the basis of race, I think it is important to note that this part of the speech only
includes Christians, and therefore whites from any other religion or no religion do not
achieve the same kind of “whiteness” as it is constructed by Red October.
Another important technique Bridges uses to once more confirm her shared
religious values with the audience is by drawing on biblical references. As dit U wil is o
Vader, waar ons in U Naam vergader, “If it’s your will oh father, where we gather in
Your name.” This affirms her trust in God as she says whether He “saves” whites in the
new South Africa is His resolve. In this way she establishes ethos. The second part of the
sentence alludes to Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three have gathered together in
My name, I am there in their midst.” Or in Afrikaans: Waar twee of drie in Ny Naam
vergader, daar is Ek in hul midde. This Bible reference is important because it comforts
the audience that God is present at this rally, and therefore they can feel more confident
in participating in a protest legitimated by divine power. Again, these biblical references
and drawing upon the Christian God as a symbol of strength, morality, and
Afrikanerhood is significant to the South African context and to this speech. One can
conclude from Bridges’ song that age and religion are important components in how
whiteness is discursively constructed.
Gender Dynamics in the Movement
According to Cloete, as she writes about the similarities between Afrikaners and
other colonizing countries’ attempts to bring “civilization” to the African continent,
patriarchy in the South African context has looked similar to the way it does in other
colonized/colonizing contexts. “The Afrikaners’ attitude towards women reflected and
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still does reflect the sentiments and practices of any other patriarchal society” (Cloete, p.
55). One unique element that has existed within white South African, and particularly
Afrikaner, gender relations is that eventually the Afrikaner also “expected Afrikaner
women to sublimate themselves to and collaborate in the establishment of Afrikaner
nationalism’s volks-utopia” (Cloete, 1992, p. 45). In her discussion of the masculinity of
the Afrikaans language in which all concepts and entities are generally male, Cloete says:
“The concept “Afrikaner” is undeniably masculine, literally and figuratively and not
simply experientially.”
Before Hofmeyr starts his speech, both he and Bridges are on stage together. They
give each other a large amount of praise and admiration to help one another establish
ethos with the audience. This public mutual respect creates a sense of strong leadership as
well as unity in the movement. There are significant differences in Hofmeyr and Bridges’
communication and behavior however, and I find it worth addressing them through the
lens of gender. I think it is important to note that there is a male and a female speaker at
this rally. This could potentially mean balancing the more aggressive and forward
qualities of a stereotypical male speaker with the seemingly compassionate and patient
qualities of a stereotypical female speaker. But instead of their gender diversity being a
sign of equality, in this section I argue that it suits the heteronormative patriarchy that
Cloete tells us exists within Afrikanerhood.
Bridges’ introduction of Hofmeyr, who she calls “everyone’s favorite,” sets him
up to be the heroic male figure and automatically reduces herself to the female side-kick.
She doesn’t even have to introduce him by his full name, and through most of the
introduction she just uses the word hy - “him.” Yet everyone knows who she means by
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hy, because he is the one the crowd has been waiting for, the rest of the speakers were
simply setting the scene for his speech. In the Christian religion as practiced by
Afrikaners, God is mostly referred to as He or Him, and yet everyone knows who you are
talking about. I feel that Hofmeyr is given superior status by Bridges in the same way, by
not announcing his name when praising and thanking him. Bridges praises him with a
desperation in her voice, multiple times claiming that the audience and herself are
unworthy of his time and presence. Hy het geen idee hoeveel dit vir elkeen van ons wat
hier is beteken nie. Baie dankie dat hy sy stem leen vir ons mense. Veral vir die van ons
wat nie vir hulleself kan praat nie. “He has no idea how much it means to every one of us
that’s here. Thank him [sic] that he is borrowing his voice to our people. Especially to
those of us who can’t speak for themselves.” This last sentence is spoken much softer and
evokes emotion because it is rather dramatized. Bridges acts the role of the submissive
female who presents the “real” leader to the crowd. By the crowd Hofmeyr is now
viewed as the hero who gives a voice to the voiceless. He also does it in an archetypal
“selfless” manner because he generously “borrows” his time and presence to the
movement. This is in opposition to Bridges who is expected to give, without receiving
extra recognition. In fact, the praise that Bridges receives from Hofmeyr reveals more
about gender dynamics within the Red October movement.
Hofmeyr tells the audience daai is ‘n generaal, “that is a general.” Hofmeyr uses
more informal Afrikaans, for example daai is a shortened version of daardie, which is the
formal Afrikaans word for “that.” The disparity in their interaction with the crowd is
significant, because Hofmeyr is much more relaxed when speaking. This could be due to
the higher level of confidence men in a patriarchal society can access, or generally
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because he is a famous Afrikaans pop artist in South Africa. Bridges comes across as
confident as well but immediately takes a backseat as Hofmeyr enters the scene.
Throughout her speech, it seems as if Bridges is more cautious with her words. As a
woman she has no room in her efforts to persuade the audience and to challenge them or
deviate from their beliefs at the same time. She therefore has to use words and images
carefully to prove that she can be trusted. Bridges more conscientiously has to play into
Afrikaner sentiments to prove that her female perspective is as worthy as a male’s. I
personally believe this is why she tries to push boundaries with her speech, in favour of
the audience, by bringing up the idea of sovereignty. “And this government should
engage with people who want to talk to them about looking after ourselves and governing
ourselves.” Self-governance is a topic few whites want to risk bringing up in public
because separate living was exactly the kind of rhetoric that former governments had
used to justify Apartheid. Yet Bridges is willing to go there to prove her bravery and
competency - at an equal status with males. Cloete (1992) recalls several events in the
history of the Afrikaner where women were stripped of their heroism while men were
“lionised” (p. 48). She adds that “heroics or mythologies aside, there is enough
documented evidence that the boer woman had the physical toughness and endurance to
hold their own against or with the men” (Cloete, 1998, p. 48).
It is therefore interesting that Hofmeyr calls Bridges generaal. Generaal is a word
mostly associated with men because generals in white South African history have
predominantly been male. Afrikaners have a positive association with the word
“general”, because some of the leaders whose guidance they still draw on, such as
Generaal De La Rey (there is a mainstream pop culture song about him), were generals.
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Again, the idea of a battle being fought is constructed to create nostalgia for the
“successes” of the Boer War. Because Hofmeyr uses words with male connotations, he
“elevates” Bridges to illustrate to the crowd that she has the same level of competency as
a man. This could be Hofmeyr’s way of awarding Bridges her heroism status, in contrast
to how women were viewed in the Boer war period, as Cloete mentions above. However,
after he calls her a general, he insinuates that she is disposable by adding net so vyf van
hulle nodig, “you only need about five of them.” In contrast to how Bridges views
Hofmeyr as the central and key figure to this protest, Hofmeyr represents Bridges as
being one of a few other individuals who simply needs to get the job done, and therefore
she is not as “special” to the movement as he is. Cloete notes too that women in the
Afrikaner history have been awarded the role as “servant to the volk” (Cloete, 1992, p.
51), similar to Bridges’ role in the speech at the Red October rally.
Hofmeyr thus doesn’t treat her, as a female, as also a core part of the protest and
he does not measure her competency in the same way he would his own or that of other
males. This is evident by how he praises her for her event-planning skills and her behindthe-scenes work on organizing the protest. Instead of making her heroic in the same way
she did with him, he diminishes the role she has played in this protest by making light of
her work. He says jokingly: Ek was al by groter proteste waar ons nie een ou kon kry
om toilette te reel nie. “I have been to bigger protest marches where we couldn’t find one
guy to organize toilets.” Hofmeyr’s specific reference to toilets, a word associated with
“petty” and lower class work, evokes laughter among the crowd. He manages to
simultaneously give Bridges credit and minimize her effort.
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Hofmeyr adds to that Alles self gedoen, “she [sic] did everything herself,” which
comes across as very paternalistic. He seems to suggest that the audience should be proud
and impressed that Bridges managed this much by herself because perhaps he believes
women usually aren’t competent enough to do that. Finally, adding to that paternalism, he
praises her for always being available. Druk op haar knoppie en sy’s daar, “Call on her
and she’ll be there.” Again this is contrasted to Hofmeyr who generously “borrows” his
time to the audience.
The way Hofmeyr refers to Bridges makes her seem dutiful, and he uses images
to connote that she knows her place and knows loyalty. This loyalty and commitment is
expected of her, whereas with Hofmeyr it is asked and appreciated to the extent that
people fear that he might withdraw it. He therefore has power in coming across confident
and independent, which creates and interesting dynamic among him and Bridges and the
audience. Bridges and the audience now have to appreciate Hofmeyr to his satisfaction,
because as a male he has the privilege of abandoning the movement. He thus has much
more agency than Bridges; he has the choice to be there. I believe this makes the crowd
want him to be there even more.
This type of audience could potentially not respect a female leader to take the lead
and will automatically view a woman in a supportive role. This movement can therefore
not exist without its male leadership, and the two leaders need to actively play into
patriarchy to appeal to the audience. Bridges is doing what is expected of her, but
Hofmeyr gets extra praise. Seeing these familiar cultural behaviors among the speakers
makes the audience feel more comfortable with participating because clearly these
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speakers represent the same values as the audience, whether consciously or
subconsciously.
Hofmeyr opens with a unique Afrikaner proverb that he directs at Bridges: Klein
botteltjie, groot gif, which translates to “small container, big poison.” It refers to
something that might look harmless or powerless, but is indeed strong and powerful. This
comment is directed only at Afrikaners, because English-speaking whites might not
understand it or experience the same kind of connection and interpretation that Afrikaners
connect with their own proverbs and images. Why would Hofmeyr need to illustrate to
the crowd that Bridges is powerful even though she “seems” harmless? This is potentially
because the general perspective of the audience has been shaped by patriarchal views and
they therefore don’t recognise or acknowledge Bridges’ strength - and the use of this
sentence then proves that Hofmeyr is conscious of the crowd’s view. The fact that the
speakers are aware of the patriarchy within which this speech takes place, tells me that it
is possible that they are using gender roles and norms to construct an appeal to the
audience. This means that “whiteness” as it is constructed through the Red October
movement exists within and requires a patriarchal structure.
Hofmeyr’s paternalistic attitude isn’t limited to his relationship with Bridges. This
behavior is also visible in other moments in the speech, but this time they are directed at
the audience.
After announcing that he looks after his own people who will stand up as a nation,
Hofmeyr tells the crowd to Kies jou groep. Kies jou groep, en mobiliseer, translating to
“Choose your group. Choose your group and mobilize.” The tone of this sentence suggest
a paternalistic attitude, because his words and pronunciation is strong, and it comes
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across as a command. The “k” and the “s” are pronounced strongly in Afrikaans, and the
word kies as pronounced by Hofmeyr is firm and intimidating or even threatening. The
same goes for the “b” “s” and “r” consonants in the word mobiliseer. With this sentence
Hofmeyr comes across not only as a strong, confident leader but also powerful enough to
give commands or orders to the audience.
At one point Hofmeyr talks about discriminating against others and then firmly
states Dit doen ons nie, “that we don’t do.” He again seems confident, and his
paternalistic attitude is evident in the way he uses “we” in this sentence. According to
Fowler and Kress (1979), the use of first-person plural ‘we,’ is often associated with
situations in which the speaker has power over the hearer (for example parent to child).
They call this use “potentially dangerous” and “not wholly sincere” (Fowler & Kress,
1979, p.?). With “we” he includes himself with the audience, but by telling them how and
what is appropriate, he remains in a leadership position and puts himself in the top of the
hierarchy. Hofmeyr then comes across as a fatherly figure speaking for the household in a
way that teaches the household this is not our way of doing things. He could be saying it
in a didactic manner, or also in a way that eases the audience’s conscience in case it was
doubtful whether this protest march in fact discriminates against others. Furthermore, the
pronoun “we” as used in this sentence implies previous dialogue, but “the ‘we’ narrator
has no access to the current communicative intentions or expectations of any of its other
members, since his/her speech act is not preceded by group deliberations” (Fowler &
Kress, p. 246). In this way Hofmeyr again establishes ethos with the audience, which
becomes a necessary relationship of trust for his paternalism to be practiced unnoticed.
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This enables Hofmeyr to come across as sincere and therefore make the views and values
that he preaches seem shared by the audience instead of possibly imposed on them.
In another instance the strong but paternalistic influence Hofmeyr has on the
audience is well illustrated when he asks Is ons anders? “Are we different?” A large part
of the audience immediately says no, but then Hofmeyr responds in English “you bet
your bottom dime we are.” He increases his perceived confidence by using an English
idiom to respond. He then asks Is ons beter? “Are we better?” to which a large part of
the crowd this time responds with yes. The crowd then, not having an understanding of
the importance of their communication, reveals the racism of the protest, even though
Bridges and Hofmeyr actively try to represent the movement as not racist. Hofmeyr
responds with a lowered voice Ons is beter as niemand nie. “We are better than no-one.”
With this lower, almost-whispering voice he sounds more authoritative. It seems as if
Hofmeyr is trying to teach the already prejudiced crowd how not to be racist, or at least
how not to represent themselves as racist. In his paternalistic way he teaches the crowd,
almost like kids, what is right and wrong in order not to jeopardize the movement. In this
case right is that they should not express that they are better than other cultures, but they
are allowed to express that they are different. Hofmeyr is thus powerful enough to
influence and change the perspectives of the crowd, whereas Bridges, as mentioned
earlier, has to encourage and play into the already existing views of the mostly Afrikaner
audience. The intended effect of having these two speakers at the rally, and for them to
enact gender roles in this specific way, is thus to find rapport with the audience and build
ethos in a patriarchal cultural context.
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Discussion: The Creation of the White Victim
Bridges and Hofmeyr are both strong and influential leaders, but the views they
advocate did not necessarily start with them. Many of the persuasive ideas in these
speeches are themselves rooted in the indoctrination of the previous ruling government.
The majority of the crowd seem to be Afrikaners who were born and raised under the
Apartheid regime and have therefore experienced the powerful indoctrination of that
government. Bridges and Hofmeyr thus recreate and maintain the ideological beliefs of
the Apartheid era through their speeches. I have touched on the fear of a threatened
Afrikaner culture earlier in this study, and in this section I unpack the creation of both the
myth of white significance during Apartheid and also, consequently, the establishment of
the idea of the post-Apartheid “rolling apocalypse.” These concepts illustrate whites’
struggle to come to terms with their loss of power and are useful persuasion techniques
because they create the idea that whites are victims of the new South Africa. Menz (1989)
addresses the importance of studying myth making and similar forms of inserting
discourse with emotional enthusiasm by stating that “myth has the function of binding
together social groups in order to represent their interests and to create a common basis of
identification” (p. 233). I argue therefore that Hofmeyr and Bridges establish pathos with
the audience through the reinforcement of already existing myths, which ultimately
creates the “victim” identity of the contemporary South African white.
A recurring myth in white public discourse is the idea that whites had been
significant and almost crucial to the development of South Africa throughout its history.
This view represents intelligent, visionary, talented whites in opposition to their
perspective of their weak, unintelligent, and unambitious black counterparts. These
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concepts are very clear in Hofmeyr’s “I am the Afrikaner” poem when he says: “The one
without whose employ this would not have once been the gem of Africa.” Hofmeyr thus
affirms what the audience already believes, that without whites the economy and
capitalist system of South Africa would not have developed because in their view black
people would not have been capable of managing resources (Hofmeyr’s emphasis on
“gem”), such as gold and diamonds.
This myth does not allow any credit to the role that people of color played in
building South Africa, and the Afrikaner is viewed as the sole contributor to the
successes of the country. As Hofmeyr says, “I am the Afrikaner, the veritable orphan of
this continent, if you like, that once placed this continent on the world map, with more
achievements than mortality rates and rape rates.” It is important to whites to feel
significant in the new South Africa and they do so through the discursive construction of
a “better” old (Apartheid) South Africa and a “worse” new (post-Apartheid) South
Africa. Hofmeyr establishes pathos with the audience through these myths, and he
therefore contributes to creating an appealing image of the Apartheid state. In the first
sentence Hofmeyr says that South Africa had “once” been the gem of Africa. That
implies that it is no longer true and that South Africa had thus economically worsened
under the black government. In the second sentence Hofmeyr insinuates that during white
rule South Africa achieved much more in comparison to today’s black rule that he
associates with “mortality” and “rape.” These are the elements of the “rolling
apocalypse” that I mentioned in the literature review - the Afrikaner view that morality,
civilization, and safety is in a permanent decline since the regime change in 1994. This
view is essentially based on many whites’ inability to come to terms with their loss of
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power and privilege. During apartheid, white people had the privilege of receiving special
security treatment by the apartheid government, and white bodies were protected with
extra rigor. In the new South Africa, security looks the same for black and white people,
but because whites are used to the idea of safe and segregated neighborhoods, they now
feel targeted. In Bridges’ song she uses the lines Ons mense smag na vrede Heer. “Our
people yearn for peace Lord.” This implies that there isn’t peace in the country and can
be interpreted by the audience that a war is being waged against whites in the new South
Africa and that the Red October protest is meant to put an end to it by bringing the issue
to global attention. She follows up that sentence with Ons kan nie meer die pyn verduur.
“We can’t endure the pain anymore.” The words “endure” and “anymore” imply
desperation. It also evokes the image of ongoing suffering. This sentence thus fulfils the
myth of the “rolling apocalypse” because it creates the idea that the situation in South
Africa is only getting worse and that this protest exists because of the desperation created
through what is perceived as a violent decline of the South African society.
That image of decline is a powerful tool of persuasion for the white audience that
supports Red October, not only because they feel they are directly targeted through it but
also because the society that they had lived in and maintained during Apartheid resonated
so deeply with them. Hofmeyr’s claim that Ons verteenwoordig die beskawing wat ons
wou gesien het, “We represent the civilization that we wanted to see,” supports that. The
word “civilization” has many connotations in this context. It could conjure images of the
colonial conquest of the Dutch settlers and eventually the Afrikaners and their pursuit of
bringing “civilization” to Africa, conveying to the audience that none of that was in vain
and this group of whites are the fruit of their ancestors’ efforts. It could also contrast this
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group who view themselves as civilized whites with what they view as South Africa’s
uncivilized black people. In many ways in white discourse, white people have become
synonymous with white rule and black people have become synonymous with black rule.
In this way Hofmeyr creates the image of Apartheid as an era of “civilization” under
white rule and post-Apartheid as an uncivil era under black rule. Hofmeyr uses this image
to underscore the feeling of the post-Apartheid decline. He provides additional evidence
for whites’ value of the old South African society by saying: “We march to prove to the
world that there are South Africans left who refuse to acclimatize to the substandard. We
know South Africans, they deserve better.” The word “acclimatize,” an active word, tells
one that Hofmeyr is referring to the current state of the nation. Here “substandard”
represents whites’ view of post-Apartheid and the current black administration. Two
pronouns are interesting in this sentence, “we” and “South Africans.” Hofmeyr
establishes ethos with the audience by including himself with them and with the act of
marching. He also establishes an in-group through “we,” one that “knows” “South
Africans.” From the first sentence one can gather that “we” represents the white group,
the group that Hofmeyr currently addresses. Taking into account the segregated history of
South Africa, one can assume that the only groups that whites “know” is whites or
Afrikaners. “South Africans” who “deserve better” are thus white South Africans. This is
one of the few if not only moments in the speech when Hofmeyr implies that this group is
not just white or Afrikaner but South African. I interpret this to show progression in
Hofmeyr’s speech, which follows a similar path to transformation in South Africa as
whites first and foremost identified as whites or Afrikaners and eventually newer
generations prefer identifying as South African.
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Despite this moment of progression in the speech, Hofmeyr’s images again
regress to older and more conservative existing myths. White people’s praise for the old
“better” South Africa is evident in the sacrifices they feel they had willingly made for the
new South Africa. “The one without whose [inaudible] you would still be facing the
mightiest defense force on this continent, but the one who chose against blood and power,
only to inherit the bloodiest land in the universe.” It is a common belief among white
South Africans that the South African National Defense Force (SANDF) had been one of
the most powerful militaries in the world during Apartheid. This was a technique of the
white government to create the illusion that white power had been stronger and more
resilient than it actually was, and as mentioned above, it was meant to prevent white
people from giving in to an inevitable change. Hofmeyr makes the audience believe that
whites had generously given up power and had willingly chosen against violence (of
which there was plenty). This image is meant to make whites and Afrikaners seem
innocent because of the noble and honorable deed they believe they did. To some extent
they perceive themselves as white saviors of powerless black people in an oppressive
system that seems to be unrelated to these whites.
From this platform of “innocence” it is much easier for Hofmeyr to shape the idea
of the undeserving Afrikaner victim, as he tries with the words “only to inherit the
bloodiest land in the universe.” This dramatic exaggeration of South Africa as the
“bloodiest land” in the entire “universe” contributes to the image of victimhood. It pushes
the audience to focus solely on its own suffering and narrows its perspective - a strategy
to have a stronger influence on that perspective. Finally the word “inherit” also plays a
role in constructing the victim image. Because whites have been and come from settlers
55
in South Africa, there has been some tension about whether they actually have a right to
South African land. Hofmeyr thus strategically uses the word “inherit” to subtly convey
the message that whites and Afrikaners rightfully have access to South African land, and
because of that legitimacy they also have the right to be victims on and through this land.
Hofmeyr draws on images that are sentimental to Afrikaners to create the idea
that this group has given up everything of value to the survival of its culture for the new
South Africa. Hofmeyr says Afrikaners have given up their “graves,” “contracts,” “long
recorded heritage,” and “legitimate sovereignty.” These honourable Afrikaners are then
thanked with “name changes” and “removing of monuments and holidays.” Whites in the
new South Africa are thus not only victims of violence but also victims of ingratitude.
These images are in general also linked with globally threatened cultures and ethnicities
and reaffirm the audience’s minority status. As mentioned before, farm murders are
symbolic of a threatened Afrikaner culture, but street and town name changes also
symbolize that threat and the consequent victimization of Afrikaners. Feeling threatened
and oppressed by these changes again indicate whites’ struggle to accept their loss of
power and privileges. Instead of facing the privilege they historically had of naming
cities, towns and streets, the Red October uses these name changes to mobilize whites
who are in fear of losing their heritage and culture. Hofmeyr hits home with another
symbol of threatened Afrikaner culture: loss of language. He says “I am the Afrikaner
that lost his mother tongue at the altar of transformation.” With this sentence he manages
not only to reinforce the image of a threatened culture but also of Afrikaner innocence.
Hofmeyr chooses the words “mother tongue” to exaggerate the loss of Afrikaans, at this
point a symbol of Afrikaner culture as a whole. The loss of a “mother tongue” is
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universally understood to mean a threat to its represented culture, and here Hofmeyr is
able to place Afrikaners in the same pool as other minorities globally. Hofmeyr uses a
biblical image with the word “altar,” implying sacrifice. This again plays into the idea
that white people and Afrikaners had willingly and honourably chosen transformation
and are therefore saviors. They are innocent and have no ties with Apartheid.
The combination of all these elements of language use and appropriation is a
rhetorical strategy to ultimately create the white victim of the new South Africa. “Now I
am the boer you tie to the sofa to witness the six hour rape of her daughters who want to
be nowhere else but on the land producing food for your family.” The word “now” gives
us an indication of time progression and that Hofmeyr is speaking of post-Apartheid
South Africa. Hofmeyr uses several emotionally charged words to construct the victim
myth. The word boer as mentioned earlier has a lot of significance to Afrikaners, and the
boer identity is associated with honour and pride. Hofmeyr uses the word “daughters” to
evoke the image of the most vulnerable citizens in the South African society. Here
“daughters” are synonymous with whites who are represented as powerless and innocent.
The image of “rape” is also significant because creating the threat of sexuality had been
one of the strongest techniques during Apartheid to victimize white people and to
demonize black people. During Apartheid this was also a way for the “master narrative”
of whites to “other” people of color and specifically black people. In white public
discourse the threat of black on white rape has continued to exist. The word also evokes
the image of taking, stealing and violently removing power, here specifically from the
image of the innocent Afrikaner. Furthermore Hofmeyr underscores their victimization
by creating the idea that these white South Africans are selfless, because all they want is
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to feed the nation. And in that white savior gesture, they want to be inclusive, they are
selfless enough to feed “your” family. “Your” here refers to black people, the opposite of
“our.”
The white victim image is finally crystallized with Hofmeyr’s song that he
performs as part of the speech, Ons sal dit oorleef, “We will survive it.” This phrase is
repeated throughout the song and resonates with the old Afrikaner belief that they are a
strong and resilient group. Hofmeyr uses an emotional tone and facial expressions as he
sings this song. Survival is an extreme image that suits the exaggerated threats to
Afrikaner culture that have been used throughout this speech.
Search for acceptance
Throughout this study I have been trying to make sense of where the speakers and
the participating members of the Red October movement are coming from. Some of their
arguments can be openly prejudiced, racist, privileged, misguided, and simply inaccurate.
But there are also moments in the speech when white South Africans’ yearning to be
relevant in the new South Africa is clear, and this in many ways reveals their insecurities.
One such moment is when Hofmeyr says “We are also South Africans.” “We” clearly
refers to white people and the word “also” possibly comes from a place where these
white people are questioning their own legitimacy as citizens of the new South Africa.
This could be because they are aware of their colonial roots in the country, or it could be
because they feel that the current Affirmative Action policies are pressuring them to feel
like they don’t belong. Either way, in the midst of images of a threatened culture and
white victimhood, I sense a feeling of being unwanted in the new South Africa, which
creates a fear of not knowing where they belong.
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As mentioned before, Afrikaners do not have any ties with their European
ancestry and have lived on South African soil for several generations. This culture has
had its origins in South Africa, and without being legitimized as South Africans,
Afrikaners have nowhere and nothing else to turn to. South Africa is all they have known
for decades, and now they are insecure about the place of their identity in the new sociopolitical context of South Africa. Hofmeyr’s speech thus reveals some hints of selfreflexivity of white’s position in the new South Africa. He ends his poem by saying “I am
your Afrikaner” with a strong emphasis on “your.” In this sentence “your” refers to South
Africa in general, and instead of contributing to all the myths and beliefs that South
Africa belongs to Afrikaners, here Hofmeyr expresses that Afrikaners belong to South
Africa. However, this sentence, in the context of the rest of the paragraph, also comes
across as a warning: I am your Afrikaner, and if you don’t accept me into your society it
will deteriorate because you need me. Hofmeyr’s entire poem is built on the images of
why white South Africans are a necessity to the welfare of South Africa, and many of
these images are threatening. Therefore, even as white South Africans and Afrikaners
have a need to belong in the new South Africa, much of that is based on the prejudiced
belief that whites are superior and that South Africa will deteriorate if it relies only on
people of color’s contribution to the country.
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CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION
In this study I explore the rhetoric used to construct appeal with white and
Afrikaner audiences at a Red October campaign rally. This speech is important to study
because of the rhetorical strategies that are used to mobilize Afrikaners and white people
in the new South Africa through the creation of the myth of the white victim. The rhetoric
in this speech has adapted to a particular historical and political context, similar to how
image-making strategies had to change in Spain in the 1940s to avoid evoking the idea of
support for fascism. Pinto calls this a “transformation,” which included the removal of
the fascist salute to appeal to international recognition because a fascist image for Spain
at the time was “entirely disadvantageous” (Pinto, 2004, p. 650).
With whiteness at its core, several significant intersections emerge in the
campaign and are discussed in this study, including gender, age, religion, class, culture,
race and ethnicity.
In terms of gender, I look closely at the relationship between Bridges and
Hofmeyr. Judging by the language they use in their interactions with each other on stage,
Hofmeyr is clearly set up to be the heroic male leader of this campaign. The importance
of his male status in a campaign that takes place within a patriarchal society is that he
first and foremost has the power to both affirm the beliefs of whites and Afrikaners in the
audience, and also to challenge and modify those beliefs without people losing trust in
him. Secondly, Hofmeyr and Bridges establish ethos with the audience by playing into
traditional gender roles – Hofmeyr being the valued savior, and Bridges the loyal and
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taken for granted female who mostly does the behind the scenes work. To gain equal
status to her male counterpart, Bridges carefully plays into Afrikaner beliefs and goes as
far as suggesting a taboo, such as sovereignty, to prove herself worthy. Some of the
metaphors and images that Hofmeyr uses when speaking about Bridges suggest that he is
aware of the gender dynamics between them and he therefore consciously subscribes to
these gender roles to satisfy and sustain trust with the audience. This gender dynamic also
translates into a paternalistic relationship that Hofmeyr has with the audience. Hofmeyr is
comfortable handing out commands to the audience and at times speaks to them as if he
is teaching them life lessons, much like a father does with his children.
Age and religion are intertwined concepts in the new South Africa. Bridges uses a
more formal version of Afrikaans that appeal to an older generation of Afrikaners. She
also draws upon several images that evoke nostalgia for the Anglo-Boer war period of
South African history that has more relevance and meaning to older Afrikaners. Due to
the fact that the post-Apartheid generation has not been indoctrinated with the same
appreciation for and loyalty to Afrikaner heritage and history, these images do not
construct appeal with Afrikaner and white youth. Bridges’ formal language is also used in
religion, and she is therefore able to construct appeal with Protestant Christians in the
audience. She also does so through quotes and images from the Bible, and through
several images reminding the mostly Afrikaner audience of their special relationship with
the Christian God. In the same way that young white South Africans have not
experienced the indoctrination of Afrikaner nationalism, they also don’t subscribe to the
strict and devout forms of practicing Christianity that were required during Apartheid.
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Therefore, even the religious imagery in Bridges’ speech appeal more to an older age
demographic and only to those who believe in the Christian God.
Understanding class dynamics within the Red October campaign requires not only
looking at the class demographic of the audience but also at the techniques the speakers
use to establish ethos with the audience using a class platform. Bridges and Hofmeyr try
to construct appeal with working class Afrikaners and whites because these are the
groups more directly affected by Affirmative Action and Economic Equity policies.
Several quotes throughout the speech refer to whites’ inability to find jobs and having to
flee the country to be employed. Both Bridges and Hofmeyr are personally unaffected by
this issue because their income is dependent on the white music industry and market and
it will remain stable regardless of the integration of the workplace. Bridges still manages
to establish ethos with the audience by finding the common value of motherhood as she
refers to the battle of “our children” to find employment. Even though Affirmative Action
policy is a recurring theme throughout the speech, there is no covert reference to class
differences within the white group (Afrikaners generally being much poorer than English
whites) or between white people and people of color in South Africa (black people being
much poorer than whites regardless of policies aimed to establish economic equality).
Throughout the analysis it is challenging to approach the conflation between race,
ethnicity, and culture in the current South African context. This is primarily because for
many in this campaign, whiteness in South Africa is synonymous with Afrikanerhood
and vice versa. The Red October movement claims to represent white South Africans, the
“white minority,” but through Hofmeyr’s code-switching techniques it becomes clear that
the “white minority” in fact means Afrikaners. As inclusive as Hofmeyr tries to be, he
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always switches back to Afrikaans from English, and even openly resists using the
English language at the rally. Much of the imagery Hofmeyr and Bridges draw on are
sentimental only to Afrikaners, and the nostalgia of these images has its origins in the
period of the Anglo-Boer War when the British and Afrikaners were in fact at war with
each other.
Additionally, some of the rhetorical images that recur throughout the speeches
evoke the fear of a threatened culture, the Afrikaner culture. In many ways Afrikaners
thus use this platform, which was originally aimed at highlighting the plight of the white
racial minority of the country, to create awareness around the issues that Afrikaners are
experiencing as a culture (or ethnicity). As explained in the text, neither as an ethnicity
nor a culture are Afrikaners a minority, and therefore they are almost obliged to unite
with English speakers under the umbrella of whiteness to be able to use global minority
status language for mobilization. Additionally, uniting under “whiteness” also enables
“othering” to take place, so that the Red October movement can demonize black people
in the same way it had during Apartheid, when English whites and Afrikaners had once
before united as an overarching “white” group. These, and several other techniques are
used by the Red October campaign to ultimately create the white victim of the new South
Africa.
Ultimately the language that Hofmeyr and Bridges use in their speeches is aimed
at primarily achieving two things. Firstly, as mentioned above, they try to create the idea
of white and Afrikaner victimhood. The speakers emphasize the idea of a threatened
culture by referring to the different ways in which Afrikanerhood is under pressure.
These include multiple references to farm murders, street name changes, and loss of
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Afrikaans in the education system. These and similar imagery establish pathos with the
audience because they are mostly drawn upon using emotive language – some of them
are even conveyed in poetry or song form. Hofmeyr and Bridges also manage to create
the concept of the “innocent Afrikaner” in relation to Apartheid by generating beliefs that
if it weren’t for the selfless choice of this group, the legal oppression of people of color
would never have ended. From that platform of “innocence” then, it is much easier to
create the idea of the unfairly treated white victim in the new South Africa.
Secondly, another important achievement of the speakers’ language use is
legitimizing the Red October campaign. This goes hand in hand with the creation of the
white victim, as Hofmeyr and Bridges’ message aims to persuade the audience that they
are a minority and they are threatened in the new South Africa, and therefore the very
existence of the Red October movement is rightful. This is important to note, because it
has bigger implications for whites and Afrikaners in South Africa. This legitimization of
the Red October movement and what it stands for translates into a legitimization of white
people’s place in the new South Africa. Some of the images in the speeches seem to be in
reaction to whites, and particularly Afrikaners’, insecurities about where they belong –
such as Bridges’ exclamation that “we are also South African.” Through the
legitimization of the Red October campaign then, Hofmeyr and Bridges are validating
white people’s existence, fears, and challenges in the new South Africa. What interests
me is that instead of legitimizing whites by metaphorically uniting them with the rest of
South Africa as South Africans, white people’s place in South Africa is legitimized here
by giving them minority and victim status.
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Despite their racist technique of “othering” to establish the white victim and
consequently the legitimacy of the current position of white people in the socio-political
context of South Africa, I think that it is important to pay attention to this yearning for
“belonging” that seems to be a big part of the white and Afrikaner experience in the new
South Africa. There is a stark difference between how white youth operate in postApartheid South Africa in comparison to older white people, especially Afrikaners.
Younger generations identify more openly and comfortably with being South African
rather than being English or Afrikaner, and they therefore have a deeper sense of
belonging to and in the country. Older Afrikaners and white people are still struggling to
come to terms with the drastic loss of power that they experienced in 1994, and their
sense of belonging to a country where they don’t have political power anymore is much
less confident. I anticipate that this campaign will perhaps be Afrikaners and whites’ final
straw to try to remain significant, and in many ways more significant than their black
counterparts, in the new South Africa. This campaign is important to understanding how
the racial landscape has evolved in the country – whereas a few years ago whites had
enough power to establish groups and campaigns that were based on racist ideologies, the
Red October campaign is an example of how white people’s approach has had to adapt.
They no longer have the power to distribute overtly racist ideas because it isn’t tolerated
anymore (at least publicly), and therefore they have taken a new approach to obtain
significance, by positing themselves as a threatened and oppressed minority.
Even though their power over the messages they disseminate has changed,
Afrikaners are not powerless communicators. This above-mentioned positioning requires
appropriation of the language used by minority groups and oppressed groups across the
65
world. Hofmeyr and Bridges structure their rhetorical devices in a way to consistently
appropriate victim and oppressed imagery and language. Studying this speech therefore
also brings into question language and power in the discursive construction of whiteness
in post-apartheid South Africa. The language used in both Bridges and Hofmeyr’s
speeches are aimed at establishing ethos, logos, and pathos with the audience, and as
mentioned before, to create the white victim image. Considering the position of this
group of white speakers in the historical, social, and economic contexts of the country,
their linguistic choices are in fact an expression of the power that they still have in South
Africa. In many ways this approach is similar to colonial ventures in the history of South
Africa – white people in higher positions of power are taking power from economically
oppressed groups by co-opting their language of struggle. The language choices in this
speech are thus a re-enactment of oppression of minority groups. This strategy is
effective because it appeals to a group of people who believe that they have lost all their
power in the current South African context, but it doesn’t reflect the reality of this
context.
The racial demographics of South Africa are unique. With the largest white
population of any other African country, the Red October campaign claiming minority
status for whites is in itself unique. The adaptation from generally more politically violent
and overtly discriminatory campaigns of an already powerful group to one that claims to
be peaceful and to be fighting oppression, might have important implications for other
racial, ethnic or cultural groups around the world. It will be interesting to observe how
campaigns adapt to their socio-political environment in South Africa and across the world
in dynamic and changing contexts.
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This study contributes to our knowledge and understanding of whiteness and
more specifically, on whiteness in the post-apartheid South African context. Considering
how different intersections operate in relation to whiteness, this study provides insight
into the important role that language plays in expressing power and establishing identity.
This study also makes a contribution to research and knowledge on how communication
strategies adapt to their political, cultural, and social contexts.
Limitations and Future Research
Limitations
Using a rhetorical analysis as method has its limitations in the sense that you
interpret how the speechmakers aim to construct appeal with the audience, but without
interviewing them, you can’t say for sure what their intention was. In the same way,
without interviewing the audience, you can’t know for certain what techniques appeal to
them and how. A rhetorical analysis is an interpretation and you have to rely on your
knowledge of the context and the speakers to do as significant an analysis as possible. A
limitation of this study is thus not knowing whether the rhetorical strategies and devices
used by Bridges and Hofmeyr were actually successful.
My sample, the video of Hofmeyr and Bridges at the Red October rally, is more
useful to me than if the speech was written, because I am able to listen to intonation and
to watch their body language. At the same time, however, this is a mediated version of
the speech and could therefore limit my ability to analyze it in the same way as I could
have if I attended the rally myself. On the same note, the speeches seem to me the best
option to study the discursive construction of whiteness in the Red October campaign, but
there could be more useful samples such as the Memorandum that they handed over to
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the South African government or news articles written on the campaign. In this study I
also look at just one speech that forms part of an entire campaign. This speech could be
providing me with just one perspective of what the entire campaign stands for, and even
more a limited representation of white people’s beliefs as a whole. This speech in the
context of this campaign is likely to attract people with a certain point of view and
therefore allows me to look at only one aspect of how whiteness is discursively
constructed.
Future research
As mentioned before, from a communication perspective it is important to
continue research on how campaigns worldwide are adapting to their socio-political and
economic contexts. Understanding how rhetoric is used in campaigns is useful in trying
to determine the status of the context itself in which a certain campaign is launched.
Exploring such rhetorical strategies without the limitations I mentioned above would
most likely require a survey or interviews with the white and Afrikaner community of
South Africa.
Furthermore, I have also expressed interest in white identity and the sense of
belonging in the new South Africa. In the news articles that were written about the Red
October campaign, I found it interesting that many different white identities were visible
in the comments sections of these articles. On the one hand white people labeled “rightwing” commented in support of the campaign, and on the other hand white people
labeled “liberal” commented against it. The spectrum in the middle of those two poles
was also represented with commentary including a “color-blindness” approach and often
a rainbow nation perspective. Originally my study was going to include a chapter on
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these “in-betweeners” as I like to refer to them, but unfortunately the question would be
too big and would require an entire study done independently of this one. It has been 13
years since Steyn (2001) wrote her book on the five different types of white identities in
South Africa. With the death of Nelson Mandela, 20 years of democracy on the horizon, a
variety of nation-branding efforts and the post-Apartheid generation’s coming of age, I
think it will be valuable for future researchers to conduct a study to determine the current
types of white identities that exist within South Africa. Determining and understanding
how white people in South Africa currently identify themselves will provide researchers
with a better idea of how aware these groups are of the current socio-political context of
the country. In return, whether for purposes of addressing racism, or other target
audience-related issues, it would simply provide campaign makers with a clearer sense of
how to construct appeal with the white South African audience. With a more critical
approach, I think that the use of language and its signification of power in the general
South African and white South African context will always remain an important subject
of research, because as the context of the country changes, so will its power dynamics
and language-use.
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